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Excerpt: The least that Findlayson, of the Public Works Department, expected was a C.I.E.; he dreamed of a C.S.I. Indeed, his friends told him that he deserved more. For three years he had endured heat and cold, disappointment, discomfort, danger, and disease, with responsibility almost to topheavy for one pair of shoulders; and day by day, through that time, the great Kashi Bridge over the Ganges had grown under his charge....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of angina pectoris; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many months. Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly existence. If it were to be otherwise--if I were to live on to the age most men desire and provide for--I should for once have known whether the miseries of delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of true provision. For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will happen in my last moments. Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at ten o?clock at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope. Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pul...

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The burden of the word of the LORD to Israel by Malachi -- 2. I have loved you, saith the LORD. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob?s brother? saith the LORD: yet I loved Jacob -- 3. And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness -- 4. Whereas Edom saith, We are impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places; thus saith the LORD of hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down; and they shall call them, The border of wickedness, and, The people against whom the LORD hath indignation for ever -- 5. And your eyes shall see, and ye shall say, The LORD will be magnified from the border of Israel -- 6. A son honoureth his father, and a servant his master: if then I be a father, where is mine honour? and if I be a master, where is my fear? saith the LORD of hosts unto you, O priests, that despise my name. And ye say, Wherein have we despised thy name?...

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Excerpt: ?WHAT do you think she?d do if she caught us? We oughtn?t to have it, you know,? said Maisie. ?Beat me, and lock you up in your bedroom,? Dick answered, without hesitation. ?Have you got the cartridges?? ?Yes; they?re in my pocket, but they are joggling horribly. Do pin-fire cartridges go off of their own accord?? ?Don?t know. Take the revolver, if you are afraid, and let me carry them.? ?I?m not afraid.? Maisie strode forward swiftly, a hand in her pocket and her chin in the air. Dick followed with a small pin-fire revolver....

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Excerpt: Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of the Riots of ?Eighty by Charles Dickens.

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Excerpt: The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf.

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The Boarding-House. Mrs. Tibbs was, beyond all dispute, the most tidy, fidgety, thrifty little personage that ever inhaled the smoke of London; and the house of Mrs. Tibbs was, decidedly, the neatest in all Great Coram-street. The area and the area-steps, and the street-door and the street-door steps, and the brass handle, and the door-plate, and the knocker, and the fan-light, were all as clean and bright, as indefatigable white-washing, and hearth-stoning, and scrubbing and rubbing, could make them....

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Introduction: Among the notable books of later times-we may say, without exaggeration, of all time--must be reckoned The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It deals with leading personages and transactions of a momentous epoch, when absolutism and feudalism were rallying for their last struggle against the modern spirit, chiefly represented by Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, and Rousseau himself--a struggle to which, after many fierce intestine quarrels and sanguinary wars throughout Europe and America, has succeeded the prevalence of those more tolerant and rational principles by which the statesmen of our own day are actuated....

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Excerpt: The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott.

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Excerpt: The Sentimentalists by George Meredith.

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HOMEWARE. PROFESSOR SPIRAL. ARDEN,............................................ In love with Astraea. SWITHIN,................................................... Sympathetics. OSIER. DAME DRESDEN............................ Sister to Homeware. ASTRAEA,........... Niece to Dame Dresden and Homeware. LYRA,..................................................................... A Wife. LADY OLDLACE. VIRGINIA. WINIFRED....

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Excerpt: One, two, three, four, five. There were five of them. Five couriers, sitting on a bench outside the convent on the summit of the Great St. Bernard in Switzerland, looking at the remote heights, stained by the setting sun as if a mighty quantity of red wine had been broached upon the mountain top, and had not yet had time to sink into the snow....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. Passing over Ickleworth Bridge and rounding up the heavily shadowed river of our narrow valley, I perceived a commotion as of bathers in a certain bright space immediately underneath the vicar?s terrace-garden steps. My astonishment was considerable when it became evident to me that the vicar himself was disporting in the water, which, reaching no higher than his waist, disclosed him in the ordinary habiliments of his cloth. I knew my friend to be one of the most absentminded of men, and my first effort to explain the phenomenon of his appearance there, suggested that he might have walked in, the victim of a fit of abstraction, and that he had not yet fully comprehended his plight; but this idea was dispersed when I beheld the very portly lady, his partner in joy and adversity, standing immersed, and perfectly attired, some short distance nearer to the bank....

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Excerpt: The Rose and the Ring by William Makepeace Thackeray.

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Excerpt: Coming in to dress for dinner, I found a telegram: ?Mrs. Stormer dying; can you give us half a column for to-morrow evening? Let her off easy, but not too easy.? I was late; I was in a hurry; I had very little time to think, but at a venture I dispatched a reply: ?Will do what I can.? It was not till I had dressed and was rolling away to dinner that, in the hansom, I bethought myself of the difficulty of the condition attached. The difficulty was not of course in letting her off easy but in qualifying that indulgence. ?I simply won?t qualify it,? I said to myself. I didn?t admire her, but I liked her, and I had known her so long that I almost felt heartless in sitting down at such an hour to a feast of indifference. I must have seemed abstracted, for the early years of my acquaintance with her came back to me. I spoke of her to the lady I had taken down, hut the lady I had taken down had never heard of Greville Fane. I tried my other neighbor, who pronounced her books ?too vile.? I had never thought them very good, but I should let her off easier than that....

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Excerpt: The Pigeon Pie by Charlotte M. Yonge.

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Excerpt: The Patagonia by Henry James.

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Excerpt: The Prisoner of Chillon by Byron.

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Excerpt: Pierrette by Honore de Balzac, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.

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Excerpt: Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency by The Duke of Saint-Simon.

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Excerpt: The ?Body Of The Nation? But the basin of the Mississippi is the body of the nation. All the other parts are but members, important in themselves, yet more important in their relations to this. Exclusive of the Lake basin and of 300,000 square miles in Texas and New Mexico, which in many aspects form a part of it, this basin contains about 1,250,000 square miles. In extent it is the second great valley of the world, being exceeded only by that of the Amazon. The valley of the frozen Obi approaches it in extent; that of La Plata comes next in space, and probably in habitable capacity, having about eight-ninths of its area; then comes that of the Yenisei, with about seven-ninths; the Lena, Amoor, Hoang-ho, Yang-tse-kiang, and Nile, fiveninths; the Ganges, less than one-half; the Indus, less than one-third; the Euphrates, one-fifth; the Rhine, one-fifteenth. It exceeds in extent the whole of Europe, exclusive of Russia, Norway, and Sweden....